Cold People by Tom Rob Smith Review

SPOILERS

Aliens invade and issue humanity with an ultimatum: get to Antarctica within 30 days. Anyone who doesn’t make it dies. The aliens own Earth now.

20 years later…

The survivors of the human genocide have created a new society on Antarctica and, in the process, have begun and continued to go down a dangerous path of genetic experimentation to create a new ice-adapted human that will ensure the survival of the human race. But these ice-adapted creatures have other ideas…

I read Tom Rob Smith’s novel The Farm a while back and enjoyed it so thought I’d give his latest, Cold People, a shot - annnnd it wasn’t nearly as good, unfortunately.

The book starts off well with a truncated history of what humans have done on the continent of Antarctica, the most hostile region on the planet for humans to live. The entire alien invasion first act was really well done and exciting. So far, so good!

And then… the middle 65-70% of the book happened, which was so, so dull.

Smith’s world-building is excellent. It’s detailed, thoughtful and convincing - if this bizarre scenario somehow happened, I’d believe that humans would create a society like this out there. The problem is that Smith only does world-building - he forgets to include a narrative with any drive. Characters just putz about in the world and the novel stalls and dies under layers and layers of unending description!

It doesn’t help either that the characters we spend the most time with aren’t compelling. Echo, one of the new ice-adapted people, is sort of interesting when reading about her powers, but she’s got a very bland personality, as do her friends and family. The Israeli geneticist Yotam has a similar problem.

Things become slightly more interesting once we’re introduced to Eitan, Yotam’s prize subject, hidden away deep in the ice, though it takes an age to get that character into play. Once he starts doing things though, Eitan steals the show and the novel ends in a semi-interesting way - except it’s a case of too little, too late, and I’d stopped caring long before that point.

A couple of plot points stood out to me as odd. I never fully understood quite why an Israeli soldier, with no aptitude for science, would be hand-picked to become a geneticist’s assistant, seemingly purely because he was a closeted gay. Or how the surviving humans don’t talk about the existence of extraterrestrial life at all. I think it’s mentioned once and then never again by anyone! That’s just weird. I’d’ve thought it’d be top of most peoples’ conversation topics but I get it - the aliens aren’t really the point, they’re just the story catalyst. And these are only a couple of nit-picks - my real issue is with the (and it is fitting to call it this rather than me trying to be punny) glacial pacing of the story once the characters reach Antarctica.

I get the different levels of the title’s meaning. How the people are literally cold, and the attitudes of the aliens towards the humans/the ice-adapted people’s attitudes towards the humans/humans’ attitudes towards genetic experimentation subjects are all “cold” as in indifferent. It’s clever but… eh. Knowing this doesn’t really add much.

Humans playing god and having it backfire is a classic staple of fiction and Tom Rob Smith’s version of that here is a promising setup of literary sci-fi - the execution though is very underwhelming. I wanted to like it but quickly became disillusioned with this tedious novel and the experience turned into a dreary slog. Cold People is ambitious, original and so very boring. Try The Farm instead from this author.